choose your weapon...

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

RANT: an oral biography

Never ever, in all my life, have I read a chapter so marvelously dedicated to used tampons and condoms. It makes me cringe with giddy embarrassment and avert my eyes from the page, just for a second, so I can convince myself... I'm an adult now. I can handle vivid descriptions of the waste products no one ever seems to talk about it. I can handle this. I can. Really. Okay... keep reading. LATER: I hit the words 'pussy plug', and my eyes do the same thing again. I can't control it. My brain just seems convinced these pages are simple too dirty and tainted and crude and ridiculously imaginative to read all at once. So instead, I’ll write this play by play of the book that makes me feel like a little innocent farm girl again… a farm girl that has picked up a Hustler for the first time. Not even a Hustler. But the anal-fetish-orgy edition of Hustler. I need a cigarette. EVEN LATER: So I'm done. I've finished the book that reads like a roller coaster on mushrooms. And acid. Pushing the boundaries... no... eliminating the boundaries between what is morally acceptable in society, and the harsh, nose wrinkling, wide eyed realities of Rant's world. I literally gasped a few hundred times along the way, always wondering what the hell one of these crazy people would talk about next. Palahnuik writes with furious humour. Or what I suppose was meant to be furiously humourous, but after all the residual shock finally wore off, I was almost too perturbed to laugh about. I can't believe I actually spelled perturbed right. 5 stars for getting into my head and making me unbelievably uncomfortable with just a few words. Minus one for the ending.